


Dead Hearts

by WhyMrSpook



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst and Feels, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gay Remus Lupin, Grimmauld Place, Lie Low At Lupin's, M/M, POV Remus Lupin, Post-Goblet of Fire, Present Tense, Sad Sirius Black, Stars, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 17:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10599045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhyMrSpook/pseuds/WhyMrSpook
Summary: Remus doesn’t mention, when Sirius joins him in looking at the stars, how his eyes always seem to find their way to Regulus. Remus gets it, he really does.Remus sits outside Sirius' bedroom at night. Just in case.





	

Grimmauld Place is dark and dusty at the best of times, miserable when the sunlight casts in through old warped glass and illuminates old mahogany sideboards, thick with grime and ornaments and moving portraits of self-righteous generations of Blacks, hung up on thick, curling wallpaper. At night, however, lit only by the moon, Remus thinks it’s sort of beautiful. At night, the faces of the portraits aren’t harsh and angular and disapproving. They look gentle in their sleep. Their frames, ornate and tarnished simultaneously, look fitting in the sorry old house. Everything is old and broken still, but in the darkness it doesn’t seem so miserable. Not quite so out of place. There is peace in the night.

Even for Remus. At least, most nights.

He sits out in the corridor most nights, half on the hard wooden floorboards and half on the worn, though he imagines once beautiful, carpets. He also imagines a young Sirius and Regulus, chasing down the corridors and skidding to a halt on said carpets when they heard one of their parents nearby. He leans his aching back against the wall of Sirius’ bedroom, just beside the door, listening carefully for any signs that his friend isn’t asleep. He knows Sirius. Or he knew him, at least, better than anyone in the world. Even James, in a sense. Anyway, he knows what it’s doing to Sirius to be back at this house. Remus is lucky. He can see the beauty in the night. In the shadows and the moonlight and the stars, because they don’t own him. The night doesn’t own him. He’s survived twelve years – thirteen now – alone. And sure, yes, maybe the night, the bite, _his furry little problem_ , have taken everything else, but he kept the beauty always. He’ll keep it until his dying day.

The stars have lost all beauty for Sirius. He said so himself, once, eyes glassy with exhaustion and half a bottle of whiskey. The stars for him were just bad memories. Family members who’d hated him with all they possessed. Remus doesn’t mention, when Sirius joins him in looking at the stars, how his eyes always seem to find their way to Regulus. Remus gets it, he really does. As pretty as the whole sky is, he can’t seem to stop looking at the moon itself. How something so distant and majestic has such sway in his life. How it guides him and illuminates, but curses him eternally. Inevitably, if Sirius is there, Remus will end up watching him instead of the sky. The night sky makes him look so pale he’s almost incandescent, but the bags under his eyes look even worse and there's a gauntness of his cheeks that’s never really gone away. Remus doesn’t think it ever will, no matter how long he’s out of Azkaban. He wonders idly how many nights Sirius spent in his cell, staring at the same stars as Remus.

The floor hurts after a while, and Remus knows he’d be comfier in an armchair, or even his bed – regardless of whether he’s actually going to sleep or not. Which, of course, he’s not. Still, he says sat on the cold floor. He’s not even forty, for Christ’s sake. He’s not about to clamber up off to bed like an old man. Then again, the average age of survival for a werewolf isn’t exactly promising – and that’s without the threat of war on the horizon. He could argue he’s already in his old age. Only that’s a miserable thought, so he quickly casts it away and returns his gaze to the window at the end of the corridor. It used to rattle with the wind, but Molly had fixed that long before she deemed it even remotely acceptable for her children to move into the house. Remus sort of missed the noise of it. Now the house is too quiet at night and too loud in the day, flooded with complaining children and Order members.

He’s learning to cherish the too quiet, and is even grateful for it when he hears the bed creaking in Sirius’ room. He freezes and listens closely for movement, but the room has fallen silent once more and he imagines Sirius has probably just rolled over to sleep. They don’t sleep together anymore. If he can even phrase it like that, because they haven’t slept together since they were nineteen and pretending to be happy and not fucked up, living together and fighting together. Back, before they lost everything.

So no, they don’t sleep together. Haven’t slept together again. Remus still believes they’re soulmates though, because apart from the few hours of sleep each of them catch here and there, they’re sort of inseparable. Maybe that’s because Sirius is starved of human company and only Remus can possibly hope to understand his pain. Maybe Remus just feels guilty for leaving him to rot in prison for all those years. He doesn’t dwell on the why, and just enjoys the present. Having Sirius sat so close he can feel how cold he is, hoping his own heightened temperature will provide sufficient comfort to him. He loves watching Sirius’ eyes light up when he gets a letter from Harry, and revels in the mood boost it provides for a few short hours before the depression sets back in. It’s worrying, but Remus pushes all that away too. He’s naturally great at worrying and overthinking, but he thinks if he dwells on their issues for even a moment he might break. He has Sirius back and that’s all that matters.

There’s a cool draft in the corridor that he enjoys quite a bit. Maybe that’s another reason why he sits out there, as opposed to in his room listening for Sirius via their shared wall. His room is lonely, distant, unconnected. It reminds him of the shrieking shack in too many ways, so when he’s in there he generally needs to leave the door open anyway. But being in the corridor, awake, still, he feels sort of dreamlike. He’ll sit and guard Sirius’ room every night until the others arrive and steal bedrooms on this floor, then he won’t be able to. Not even leave his door open.

Remus tugs at a loose thread in the carpet, and pulls away a string of emerald green. Did Sirius once pretend they were fields? Did he make toy brooms soar above endless pastures and feel infinite. Back, before he realised what he’d been born into. Back at Hogwarts, he’d spoken of his early years with a degree of affection. Particularly Regulus. As the years went on, he’d mentioned his family less and less. He seemed to reject the very idea he’d once been oblivious and happy. Now, he never mentions his childhood at all. Remus isn’t sure if it’s because he’s ashamed of who he once was, or angry at who he could have been. Remus gets it. If he were in Sirius’ shoes, if he could go back, just be an ignorant Slytherin… Sirius would never have lost his brother, or his cousins. He’d never have had to lose James and Lily, or been betrayed by Peter and Remus. Yeah, Remus gets it. Logically he knows nothing is that simple. Slytherin children are still _children_ , not evil. Certainly not happy by default. But the idea persists.

Remus nearly jumps out of his skin when the door to his left creaks loudly and swings open, letting a wave of warmer air out into the corridor.

“Remus?”

He realises that every single muscle in his body has tensed when he tries to move, so he forces himself to take a deep breath. “Yeah, Sirius?”

“Are you ever going to come in here?” The voice is small and tired. Remus tries to imagine those words spoken from the man he once knew, cocky and boisterous, damn seductive even. He fails.

“Sure, Pads.” He replies quietly, dragging himself off the floor and once again ignoring the idea he’s getting on a bit. His muscles only ache from last week’s full moon, nothing else. Nor does he bother to ask how Sirius knew he was outside, because logic dictates that Sirius hasn’t been asleep at all. Probably hasn’t been any night Remus has guarded him.

Sirius’ bedroom is more miserable than the rest of the house put together. Nothing has changed since the night Sirius ran away, Sirius admitted to him one afternoon when they were cleaning this floor on Molly’s orders. It is a shrine to the seventies. A time capsule of the rebellious youth that had been Sirius Black. He looks frail now, but he shuffles up in bed and throws the covers back for Remus to join him.

Heart in his mouth, Remus does. He slides in next to Sirius like he belongs, trying not to breathe too obviously because no-one needs to know how fucking tense he feels. Tense and terrified and overjoyed, because this is a step – in some sort of direction, at least. They don’t sleep together. Maybe there’s nothing romantic left in either of them, not now, but they’re all each other has. And Harry. So they have to be strong and together for Lily and James’ sake.

They’re lying so close together, all Remus has to do is turn onto his side and he thinks their lips would brush together. So he doesn't turn, but he shifts his hand between them and tries not to react when Sirius’ finds its way into his. It is what he wanted, after all. 

“You’re so cold, Sirius.” Of course, Sirius always is. He wasn’t, always. In fact, James and Peter used to frequently complain that Remus and Sirius were both furnaces and so neither were suitable for top and tailing with. Until winter, of course, when James and Sirius would be caught cuddling fucking _anywhere_ to keep James warm. Remus never caught Peter in his bed, but he was sure that rat had snuck in with him sometimes. Back in the day. Remus is still hot, now. It’s his natural state considering his condition. But Sirius hasn’t stopped shivering for the last two years, Remus knows. As much as he wants to touch, to hold, he never has done.

“Down to my bones.” Sirius agrees quietly. “Why have you never come in before?”

“You’ve never asked me in before.” Remus replies, without missing a beat. In a way, that really is how simple it is. For all his suppressed worries and anxiety and unending misery, he’d have stepped into this room from the first night if Sirius had asked.

“Is it always going to be this hard?”

Remus turns onto his side to properly face Sirius, but he makes sure to keep his head back. He can't risk broaching the subject of romance, not now. If he starts now, he don’t think he’ll ever be able to stop.

“Twelve years, Sirius. I would have left you in there forever, I wouldn’t have even questioned it-”

“I forgive you, Remus.” And suddenly, the hand on his moves to his face, cold and little bones too prominent in the dark, but comforting nonetheless. Sirius speaks like the world is ending, and maybe it is. They’ve lost so much time and Remus wants to accept the present with all his heart, but the guilt is staggering. So yeah, that is the reason he sits outside Sirius’ door every night and stares at the night sky and tries to find beauty in the dark. It’s all he has. “Do you believe me, Remus? Because it’s not enough. Whatever we’ve become. It’s never enough.”

Sirius’s breath is warm, even if his body isn’t. He used to smell of cologne and chocolate and peppermint. An eclectic mix of rich and wonderfully enticing scents, purpose built to lure Remus into his bed every night. Now, beneath the distant mint of hours before, he smells faintly metallic. Coppery, like his mouth is bleeding. Remus knows Dumbledore had the decency to at least get Poppy Pomfrey to see to Sirius after his innocence was made known to him, but Sirius has always had a self-destructive streak a mile wide. He always used to chew the insides of his cheeks at night so James wouldn’t hear him cry. The fact that he might still makes Remus’ chest ache and tighten painfully.

“You should hate me.” He whispers, and he isn’t crying. Resolutely he’s not crying, because he’s a grown man, and he’s cried enough over Sirius already.

“I couldn’t if I tried, Remus. You lost everything and I… it didn’t even occur to me, till weeks after.” Sirius admits, and fucking hell, he’s actually crying and moving closer to Remus like he’s stopped giving a damn about Remus’ protests already. “It didn’t even occur to me that I was leaving you with nothing, Remus. I spent every single day of those twelve years wondering if you were even alive. If you’d moved on. If you were ever happy.”

“How could I be?”

“I’m sorry.” Sirius says then, regaining some composure from _somewhere_ , just on the edge of outright sobbing. “I’m so sorry.”

Remus sees the futility of it all. This is precisely why he keeps repressing his anxiety. It’s easier to just exist in peace, to find a new normal and operate within it for as long as they need to, until they’re out of the danger zone. Remus will do anything Sirius asks of him. He’ll leave his bed that instant and go back to sitting outside his room every night. He’ll sit next to him in Order meetings, too close to be anything other than intimate and too far to not feel moderately uncomfortable for each of them. He’ll let Sirius make fun of him to the Weasley boys and tease back easily, as if they’re still schoolboys themselves. After dinner, resting in the lounge, he’ll still watch Sirius staring at the stars and know they’re soulmates. But he’ll be perfectly content to just sit and know.

“It won’t always be this hard.” Remus decides quietly, and he extends an arm around Sirius’ waist and pulls him in close. He’s freezing, truly, and it’s almost like a punishment to be so close for a moment. But Remus takes it willingly, brushing his lips against Sirius’ forehead. They are both battered and far older than their years, weighed down by guilt and hurt. But in the dark they’re sort of beautiful. They don’t look so out of place.

“I don’t ever want to be apart from you again, Moony. We owe each other more than that, don’t we? Our relationship was never sitting down and waiting.” Remus smiles at that, because no, it never was. It was impossible when Sirius was involved. As a teenager, he’d been an unstoppable force. Sometimes, in order meetings, he seems to regain a spark of his former self and it always leaves Remus both ecstatic and heartbroken. Those moments are always so fleeting.

“Try and sleep, Pads. I’m right here with you.”

There’s a small sigh against his cheek, and Remus swears they're so close he can feel eyelashes fluttering closed against his skin. There is silence in Grimmauld Place, and in a few short hours there will be the barbaric antics of three teenage boys and Hermione Granger. Remus doesn’t mind, because he’s in bed with his soulmate. Maybe nothing is okay. Maybe it’s going to be years before anything ever seems easy again, but they still fit. Remus has never belonged anywhere else but Sirius’ arms his entire life. They just fit.


End file.
